


Charles Xavier: Child Soldiers and the Man Who Bred Them for War

by ErnieThePyle



Category: X-Men - All Media Types
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-26
Updated: 2016-07-26
Packaged: 2018-07-26 19:20:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7586710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ErnieThePyle/pseuds/ErnieThePyle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To many mutants Charles Xavier is a hero, a leader, a healer and a teacher. There's no telling how many lives he's saved. But how many has he cost in a war in which he appointed himself general?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Charles Xavier: Child Soldiers and the Man Who Bred Them for War

Sari Desai remembers being scared. She remembers the sound of the engines rumbling through the cramped gray interior of the plane. And she remembers looking down at the fresh black uniform encasing her skin and wondering what it was the bald man in the wheelchair had gotten her into.

“Xavier told me I was ready,” Desai repeats frequently as she remembers her first and last day as one of the X-Men, the mutant superhero team founded by Charles Xavier and originally, and still frequently, comprised of children. Most started as teenagers, some barely old enough to shave, and like Desai they were told that they were all that stood between Mutantkind and a world that hated and feared them.

Desai was 16 years old when the doors to the jet opened at 10,000 feet. She’d been at Xavier’s Institute for Gifted Children in upstate New York for nearly a year and had finally grown comfortable with the manifestation of her X-Gene into the ability to generate, and travel along, paths of electromagnetic energy. She adopted the mutant nickname of Current and found she could travel vast distances in the blink of a flash of rainbow light. So Charles Xavier told her to jump out of an airplane. 

“Xavier said all I’d have to do was get people to safety. He said he’d be with me the whole time,” Desai says quietly as she discusses the moment when the doors flew open and the wind rushed, howling and cold, inside the sleek black frame of the jet. 

Abating her concern, she says, was the already hundreds of hours she’d logged in the training simulator the X-Men apparently call the Danger Room: a giant metal structure buried deep within the Institute grounds that former students say housed every manner of simulated weapon and peril. 

Xavier, some of the former students say, freely pitted children against those weapons to test their skills, starting with relatively safe simulations even the youngest of students went up against, to more difficult ones sporting lasers that could render second degree burns if one wasn’t careful. And there were rumors of even more advanced and dangerous simulations. 

Desai says she got hit at least once by those lasers. But that night in the jet they were the least of her worries.

It was November of 2014 and below her the town of Elwood, Ohio was burning. The Delhi, India native recalls the smell of hot sulfur in the air as she looked down at the devastation wrought by a rogue mutant, later identified as John Allerdyce, and better known as Pyro. 

Allerdyce had been working with a team of unpowered criminals on a cross-country tour of violence and mayhem when they’d been cornered by the Ohio State Police at a barn just outside the center of town. Allerdyce appears to have panicked and started burning everything in sight. The six men he was with—all gang members who’d spent time in prison on felony charges—opened fire with automatic weapons. 

According to Desai, Xavier was tipped off to the scene, as he so often was, by the psychic machine called Cerebro, which amplifies his own enormous telepathic powers to sense, read, distort, control and manipulate the minds of others, some half a world away. Without any contact, let alone a request, from local authorities, Xavier dispatched a team to Elwood, with Desai in tow behind a group of three others who were by then hardened soldiers. The oldest of them was just 21 years old at the time, Bobby Drake, or Ice Man to the world. 

“Bobby ran into my room and told me to suit up,” Desai says. “I was doing trigonometry homework.” 

Desai had known the moment was coming. Many at Xavier’s wait to be approached, when one of the instructors or Professor X himself will pull the student aside and ask if they’re willing to answer the call. If they’re willing to go out on dangerous field missions and be the public face and the defending power of the X-Men, the first line of defense in a war Charles Xavier has been fighting for decades. 

When she was asked, Desai said yes. She doesn’t remember hesitating or needing time to think about it, she just recalls being excited at the prospect of being an X-Man. She wanted to see the world past the Institute. She wanted to make a difference, to help people, and yes, to save the world in grand fashion. Now however, she says she didn’t really understand what it would mean to get called up. And then Bobby Drake popped into her room. 

“I think I stared at him for a second, but then I told him I’d see him at the jet,” Desai says. Catching up was easy for a young woman who’s still unsure exactly how fast she can travel, even if she could only jump a few dozen feet at a time down the antique wood-paneled hallways of Xavier’s ancestral home. It’s also the place he’s turned into a school, training ground and medical and research facility, one that that now houses more than 100 students at any given time. 

The rest of the team was already assembled by the time Desai flashed into the hangar underneath the school’s basketball court. Aside from Drake, there was the speedster Northstar, 19 year-old Jean-Paul Beaubier, and the pyro/electro-kinetic Jubilee, 17 year-old Jubilation Lee. 

The plan outlined to Desai, as the custom jet the X-Men call a Blackbird blasted upward and westward, was simple: use her to get civilians to safety while Drake, Beaubier and Lee would confront and neutralize six heavily armed killers and the powerful mutant incinerating large swaths of Elwood, population 12,000.

“Bobby said ‘we’ll be right behind you,’” Desai recalls as the Blackbird hurtled towards Elwood. And then the doors hissed opened. She remembers taking a deep breath, saying a quiet prayer to Krishna, and then stepping out into the whirlwind. 

“I was pretty comfortable with my powers by then,” Desai says. “10,000 feet was easy. The trick was just looking for the little black dots of people. Xavier was in my head, steering me.”

Xavier’s powers allowed him to coordinate between the team members in real time without a radio. From a safe distance at his Westchester County, New York estate 600 miles away, Xavier directed Desai in-between burning buildings and hails of gunfire. 

By accounts, Desai managed to pull at least six people out of the firestorm, individuals who recall a blur of light flashing in front of them and then a sensation of being yanked through space as she jumped from flashpoint to flashpoint. Desai would jump with her frightened passengers until she found the cordon line of police officers trying to keep the rest of Elwood away from the destruction, about a mile and a half from the center of the action. 

All Desai really remembers are the flashes of fear and the look of astonishment on the faces of the people at the cordon line as she jumped the bystanders to safety, with little enough time to take a breath and re-center herself before Xavier would urge her back into the fray. 

“They kept yelling at me. But I couldn’t really hear them,” Desai says. She was too busy on the mission. Too busy trying not to throw up, too busy trying not to be scared, too busy living up to the expectations drilled into her for the last 10 months of her life. 

And that’s before the voice in her head. 

“You’re doing well,” Desai says Xavier told her, over and over again, when he wasn’t steering her left or right, up or down, around the gunfire or through the flames. 

The things Desai could hear most, she recalls, was the gunfire all around her as she flashed from point to point. There was also the whistling, some that seemed to go right past her ear as she continued her frantic search for survivors among the heat and the death. 

In between the flames, Desai watched Northstar zip through the air as he took down one gunman and then the next in a lightning blur. She watched the shower of fireworks as Jubilee engaged the others and she observed the thunderous crash of hot and cold as the battle between Ice Man and Pyro drifted toward the center of town, where it would eventually bury what was left of the town hall under nearly eight tons of ice. 

The battle itself lasted all of three minutes, according to police records and eyewitness accounts. By the end there were eight dead, including five civilians and three state troopers. All were killed before the X-Men arrived. And police have no doubt more lives would have been lost if not for the teenagers and their leader just old enough to drink. Pyro and all his men were subdued and turned over to the authorities. 

Desai jumped in among the group just as the rest of her team was handing over the stunned assailants, her heart pounding in her chest and adrenaline flooding her system. 

“I could barely feel my fingers,” Desai recalls. “And then Jubilee took a look at me and the smile on her face vanished. I looked down and all of a sudden I saw blood.” 

A stray bullet had caught Desai in the abdomen. She wouldn’t start feeling it for another 10 minutes, when the adrenaline finally wore down and all she could experience was pain. Heedless of calls from local law enforcement that there was a hospital 10 minutes away, Desai’s team shuffled her back into the jet and rocketed back to Xavier’s, a trip that took nearly an hour even at top speed. 

Her surgery lasted six hours, according to Institute records Desai managed to obtain. Recovery would take far longer. 

Desai still bears the scar from the 7.62 caliber bullet resident Ph.D. Hank McCoy, A.K.A. Beast, dug out of her. She wistfully recalls other injuries patched up, far more quickly and with far less scarring, by the X-Men’s resident powered healers, but none were at the mansion that day. That bullet? It was likely fired by an AK-47, a popular rifle employed by armies the world over. 

But Desai wasn’t in a combat zone. She was in a school, and today, she doesn’t think she should have been anywhere near Elwood. 

Desai is one of several former students now speaking out about Xavier and his Institute, most for the first time. They want their stories to be told. They want the world to know that when one of the most famous men alive asks you to save the world, it can feel impossible to say no. And most of those famous men aren’t even psychic. 

Some of Xavier’s angrier critics fear that the professor leverages far more than his personality to mold young minds. They worry that he’s actively used his powers to further his cause and achieve his aims, perhaps to manipulate or perhaps just to nudge thinking in a direction he wants it to go.

Desai herself wonders if adrenaline alone is really enough to completely drown out the anguish of a gunshot wound. Her tolerance to pain has never been that strong but somehow, she was able to keep going that day without even realizing she’d been shot. 

“I can’t believe Xavier would just blind me to getting shot,” Desai says. “But I’m really not sure if it’s just because I don’t want to believe it.” 

**The Cost of War**

Perhaps the thing Xavier’s critics fear most is that his power has had a cost far more terrible than the scar that Desai will bear on her stomach for the rest of her life. It’s a cost spread across more than 850 students estimated to have walked through those gates and lived, and at least a dozen who have not. 

“My brother was 17,” says Jai Mearn as he recalls the young man Xavier dubbed Twist. His name was Andre and he grew up in the projects of Baltimore, the son of Jamaican immigrants. Andre’s parents sent him to Xavier at age 14, when his ability to bend his rubbery body at impossible angles became so difficult to control that he’d find himself wrapped in a full-body knot just trying to get out of bed. 

For Andre, disentangling himself could take hours and often required help. His family recalls an angry, frustrated young man who couldn’t seem to bend his way back to the thoughtful teenager who loved quoting Jay Z lyrics. But then Andre went to Xavier’s. 

Professor X showed Andre how to control his rubbery frame and he showed him that there was more to life than just squeezing into society’s tight expectations. By the time Xavier was done with him, Andre was a skilled hand-to-hand fighter who could dance around an area like a coiled wraith and loved showing off to everyone willing to watch. 

Andre went on at least two publicly-documented missions with the X-Men. Media reports show a young man bearing his description and power set pulling people out of a major mudslide that struck in northern India. They also show him helping the X-Men to stop a brutal anti-Mutant campaign launched by tacitly government-sanctioned paramilitary forces in Chad. 

There are likely more stories of Andre’s heroism, credited with saving more than 50 lives as is, but the X-Men have often had a tense relationship with outside eyes. 

That reticence is not without good reason. While mutant advocacy by Xavier and his more pacifist brethren have made a dent in fighting genetically based racism, those with the X-gene are still nearly 10 times more likely to face discrimination in the workplace and elsewhere, with laws still on the books in more than a dozen states openly sanctioning different treatment. Mutants in the U.S. are three times more likely to be the victims of murder. Elsewhere in the world, that number can jump to as high as 15 fold. 

Andre appears to have been a dedicated participant in combating those statistics. And he put his powers to good use. 

“Dre thought what he could do was so cool,” Mearn recalls, speaking of watching his brother twist his way around jungle gyms and tree-branches. Andre, Mearn says, spoke sometimes of one day leaving the Institute to ply his skills as a professional firefighter or in some other rescue capacity. 

“He was so thankful to Xavier for helping him to control it,” Mearn says. “And he talked so much about being his best mutant self, about living up to his fullest potential. He kept saying, ‘be flexible’ like it was more than a power set.” 

Mearn doubts his brother would want anything to do with speaking out against the Institute. In letters, Facebook posts and conversations with friends, Andre expressed nothing but admiration for Xavier, his school and his mission. But Andre isn’t here anymore. And someone needs to speak for him, Mearn says. 

Andre had been working directly with the X-Men for more than a year and a half when Sentinels—mutant-hunting robots employed by a variety of extremist hate groups—attacked the Institute. “They told me Dre didn’t blink to put himself in between the Sentinels and the younger students,” Mearn says. 

Students who were there that day in March 2011 remember more than a dozen armed and armored robots blasting holes into the school. The machines had flown in from the west at dusk, the sun to their backs. Most of the school’s senior staff was on a high-profile and well-publicized mission to Ireland working with an old flame of Xavier’s named Moira McTaggert. A splinter faction of the hate group known as the Purifiers had gotten their hands on some Sentinels and apparently thought the away mission was the perfect time to strike. 

Andre appears to have been on his laptop writing a paper when the Sentinels attacked. The last page open, in addition to a paused playback of Jay Z’s Big Pimpin’, was a word document titled “Oddballs of history, from Da Vinci to Mutants.”

Then 13 year-old Cody Somme remembers Andre as one of the first to confront the Sentinels. Somme, an Xavier loyalist who agreed to speak to the Bugle only to accurately remember Andre, says the older student bound between the machines in an apparent effort to distract them away from the rest of the Institute. 

“He kept yelling to run,” Somme remembers. “He moved so fast, he was trying to get the Sentinels to hit each other, bouncing back and forth, jumping on one and then dodging the fire at the very last second. I think he took out two of them that way.”

Others remember Twist virtually dancing in the air, trying to jump through the tree branches and steer the Sentinels into the wooded grounds that encircle Xavier’s estate. He would jump at one Sentinel then back to the trees, and on to another machine, using his speed to confuse their targeting sensors. One would come around a tree chasing him, its jet engine blaring and its guns firing, only to find Andre was no longer there. But another Sentinel was. 

By accounts, Andre managed to disable or destroy at least five of the Sentinels before he was killed. At least one witness believes he misjudged the timing when tricking one Sentinel into attacking the other. The rest of the machines were destroyed by a combined effort of the school’s remaining older students and the handful of instructors on hand. 

Andre’s family wouldn’t find out what happened to him for nearly 24 hours, 21 of them spent in blind anguish after they heard about the attack but weren’t able get in touch with him or anyone else to learn if he was still alive. 

“His phone kept going straight to voicemail,” Mearn says. “And the number we had for the Institute just kept ringing.”

Mearn still calls his brother’s number sometimes: the voicemail hasn’t been disconnected. Mearn pulls out his own phone, puts it on speaker and dials in as a demonstration.

The energetic voice of a young man comes in clearly and Mearn visibly tenses. “You’ve reached Dre,” the recording says, “but he’s not here right now ‘cause I’m either doing homework or saving the world.” 

A day after the attack at the Institute, someone knocked on the door of the quiet row house in which the Mearns live. When they opened it, they were greeted by Somme and a man with blue fur and the ghastly features of a demon, features nevertheless overpowered by a friendly smile. His name is Kurt Wagner; the X-Men call him Nightcrawler. 

In addition to his skills a teleporter and acrobat, Wagner is an ordained priest, one who’s been sent more than once to unsuspecting doors, a notifying chaplain for an army that fashions itself a school. 

Wagner continues to insist that the Institute is a school first and foremost. He was one of a handful of the facility’s faculty willing to sit down with the Bugle in an effort to defend its radical tactics. 

“These are children. And they deserve to be treated and protected as such. But they are also targets,” Wagner says. 

According to Wagner, Xavier does everything in his power to protect the Institute’s children, to give them the chance at a normal life where they can control their powers and live out their lives as free citizens. No one wants to put children in harm’s way, says Wagner, who emphatically argues that the X-Men are not an army. 

And Charles Xavier is not a general, Wagner says, he is a teacher, one who’s dedicated his life to helping thousands and saving thousands more from rogue mutants, terrorists and cosmic threats. 

The work of the X-Men is that of protectors, Wagner says, recounting the team’s many victories. Without question the superheroes have saved countless lives. But Wagner also acknowledges the cost. 

When asked about the notifications he’s made, Wagner can name each student and he can recall in vivid detail the people who answered the door. 

“It is the greatest tragedy. The very worst thing I do,” he says. “But I would be knocking on so many more doors if it weren’t for Charles Xavier. And the X-Men.” 

For Wagner, Xavier has no choice but to teach children to fight. No one is ever forced, or coerced or manipulated to put on a uniform, Wagner emphasizes. Every choice is the student’s alone, he says, and Xavier agonizes over who is ready, over who has the combination of power, temperament and skill to be an X-Man. 

“When we tell Charles a student is not ready,” Wagner says, referring to fellow faculty, “he listens.”

**The Voices**

Talia Shepphard is done listening. The Orlando, Florida native has spent the last two years trying to find former students she believes have been traumatized by their time with Xavier. The goal is to form her own support group and nonprofit, one that hopes to one day provide therapy, counseling and a place to go for those who leave Xavier and feel they need somewhere to recover. 

The group, known as X-Orphans, is also considering a wider measure of advocacy to directly challenge Xavier. For now however, their activities amount to little more than weekly meetings to swap stories and trade advice on everything from good therapists to the latest word on the Institute from the ether. 

“I have eight members already,” Shepphard says. “And they’ve all seen through the lie that is Charles Xavier.” 

Shepphard speaks of her time with Xavier, when she briefly called herself Look, based on her extra-sensory visual perception across the electromagnetic spectrum and beyond, as if it were a lifetime ago. In reality, it was just six years. But Shepphard believes it will be at least six more before she can even begin to truly undue the damage to her psyche. 

“I see the way people are broken, it’s one of the ways my ability works,” Shepphard says. “And then I look at myself in the mirror and I can see every single scar that place gave me.” 

Shepphard rolls up a sleeve and points to her left arm, just below the elbow. “I can still see the bullet residue,” she says of the time she was used as a lookout on a delicate field mission, only to be caught in the crossfire when a terrorist group took a potshot at a mutant activist the X-Men were protecting. “I can see the angle it hit. I can see that it was made in Russia based on the trace metals in the chemical signature.” 

Xavier judged Shepphard and her classmates not by who they were or what they wanted in the world but in what use they could be to the man and his mission, she says. She recalls Xavier as an exacting tutor who was constantly pushing her to keep looking out at the world, even when all she wanted to do was shut her eyes. He’d make her stand on the Institute’s rooftop for hours, scanning the horizon, sometimes for satellites in orbit and sunbursts passing by Earth, and sometimes for more immediate threats. 

Xavier had thought Shepphard might one day serve as a powerful early warning apparatus for Mutantkind, she says, and she felt enormous pressure to use those abilities regardless of whether or not she wanted to. 

Where others speak of the choice they were given to put on the X on the uniform, Shepphard thinks there was none. Not for her and not for any of the other X-Men. She’s compiled detailed logs of her time at the Institute and that of her groups’ members, going over each interaction with a fine-tooth comb for signs of coercion, be it emotional, mental or psychic. 

“Every lesson plan is built around Xavier’s worldview. Every class, every field trip, every reading that every kid does there is designed to make them an X-soldier,” she says. 

Some psychologists agree. 

Kerry Venn has been studying superhero groups for nearly a decade. The UMass Amherst PhD researcher tries to figure out what makes the team dynamics tick, what spurs one powered individual to break the law while others try to save the world.

“And then there’s Charles Xavier. The general in search of a war,” Venn says. 

It’s worth noting that Venn has never been in the room with Xavier. But he’s still confident of the analysis, both based on his study of Xavier’s writings and speeches as well as in-depth interviews with Shepphard and other members of her group.

Venn agrees wholeheartedly with Shepphard. He thinks Xavier breeds children for war and he thinks he knows how it’s done. 

“In a lot of ways these kids are easy,” Venn says. “As mutants they’ve already endured so much.” 

Venn believes Xavier starts small and works his way up, from basic kindness to instilling in his students the general decency to help their fellow mutants. But then there’s only one way to do that in Xavier’s mind, Venn says. 

The American Psychiatric Association has only just begun to dip its toes into superheroes and psychics. The group has issued a few statements urging psychics to practice caution and leave psychology to trained professionals but it has also expressed admiration for Xavier’s work. 

“Charles Xavier has clearly been a hugely positive influence for mutant rights, both as an activist and an inspiration,” the APA said in a report last year that tried to chronicle the psychological benefits that having a positive voice has had for mutants. The group did not discuss Xavier’s powers or the X-Men’s paramilitary activities directly, instead saying that further study is needed, and it declined to comment for his story. 

Xavier himself is more humble. 

“I do what I’m able. Sometimes that just means changing the world of one student for one moment. Sometimes it means more than that,” he told the Bugle in his office. 

Xavier swears profusely that he’d never enter a mind without permission. And that he would never manipulate someone, with his powers or otherwise. 

Xavier says he knows the cost of what he’s done all too well. Better than anyone. 

“Every death gives me pause,” he says. “But there are so many more we save. And I do everything in my power to save them all.”

And the children who put on uniforms and march, or leap, or teleport, into battle?

A look of genuine pain crosses Xavier’s face. He pauses. 

“I wish there was another way,” he says. “But pure pacifism can only go so far. And these are children with the problems of the adult world. I prepare them as much as I am able and I let them live as much of a childhood as I can. But the world will not let them take all the time they need to grow up.”

Xavier himself bears the scars of his war. He’s been confined to that wheelchair since an old friend the world now knows as the mutant terrorist Magneto put him there. And he says he misses the ability to walk every day. But the cause trumps all.

Professor X points to a far wall where young, smiling faces beam out at the onlooker, former students who’ve since gone on to join the world. 

“They write to me, most of them,” he says. “Telling me they wouldn’t be able to function among Homo sapiens if not for what they learned here.” 

As for his detractors, including former students, Xavier says there will always be those discontented with his work. All he can do is his best, he says, and hope their hate is worth any benefit they might have gained during their time at the Institute. 

**Moving On**

Jonaton Mizrahi doesn’t hate Xavier. Really, he doesn’t know what to think about the man and his cause. 

“I was a good little soldier,” the master illusionist once known as Distort says. Mizrahi bends light through the air, creating flashes and shapes and, when he concentrates, nearly life-like holograms. 

The former Israeli Kibbutz resident spent more than three years working with the X-Men. By his own count he’s saved more than 40 people and helped defeat dozens of terrorists, criminals and powered foes. He even learned to turn light into a weapon, focusing beams of white-hot energy on exposed skin and sensitive equipment. 

On good days, Mizrahi still thinks of those days fondly. He still remembers playing hero. And loving it. 

“What I’m most proud of, I think, is Denali,” Mizrahi says. 

He means Denali National Park in Alaska, where Mizrahi and a team of six other X-Men deployed in the summer of 2014 to protect a group of teenage mutants and unpowered individuals. The teenagers were on an experimental nature retreat to try and forge bonds between the sub-species. There were more than 30 campers between the ages of 13 and 16, all unaffiliated with Xavier. But that didn’t stop a band of Purifier terrorists from targeting the backpackers, killing three and holding the rest hostage. 

Law enforcement was afraid to try and approach the terrorists, encamped deep in the forest, with nothing but foliage for miles around to mask their approach on a group of 20 heavily-armed men, including at least five sporting experimental exo-suits that made them virtual walking tanks. The X-Men knew no such fear, especially not when two of their own could help mask the approach. 

“The trick was to not be extreme,” Mizrahi says as he recalls how the team moved into position. 

Normally, the woman named Ororo Munroe and better known as Storm could just lay down cloud cover, but the X-Men felt the Purifiers would know a thick cloud could only mean one thing. So Storm kept the clouds light and Mizrahi, then 17, did the rest. 

“We were on top of them before they knew what was happening,” he says. 

The fight was short and brutal. Four of the X-Men: Storm, Jubilee, Ice Man and the flying, super-strong power-leach known only as Rogue drew as many of the Purifiers away from the campers as they could to engage them out in the forest. That left Mizrahi, Nightcrawler and Beast to free the hostages and take on the remaining guards, including one of the exo-suit wearers.

“We didn’t have much data on the suits, just some B.S. from the Army that they’d been stolen,” Mizrahi says. He leaves unsaid the widespread scandal unveiled last year when a former Purifier came forward to claim that high-ranking military brass had been funneling high-tech weaponry to hate groups, or at least looked the other way.

Mizrahi knew his best bet was to blind and confuse the men, using a combination of white-hot flashes of light and more subtle illusions meant to make them think there were far more attackers than there really were. While Mizrahi hit the terrorists with light, Nightcrawler and Beast hit with their fists.

The melee left virtually all of the attackers incapacitated within moments. But then Mizrahi realized the exo-suit came with eye protection specially designed to safeguard the wearer from things light flash-bang grenades and bursts of hot light. 

“He hit like a truck,” Mizrahi says. He lifts up his arm to show the break that never quite healed. Mizrahi was thrown more than 20 feet by the hit. He thinks he lost consciousness for a moment as he crashed into the brush, only to come to a few seconds later to watch Beast bounding around the armored Purifier while Nightcrawler teleported in and out in the air around the man, striking at heavy steel armor with little effect. 

The force of the hit gave Mizrahi pause. It was one of the first times he’d encountered such a powerful adversary and he was scared. He’d been fighting back the panic the entire flight to Alaska, a journey only made worse by the research he did on the Purifiers while en route. The internet’s tales of the group are not for the light of heart.

All of this, Mizrahi says, was racing through his mind as he recovered his senses, his arm throbbing, Charles Xavier a distant voice mostly blotted out by a psychic dampener the Purifiers were using to keep their minds clear. But as he watched the melee, Mizrahi says he also glanced at the campers that the X-Men were there to save. 

“They were so scared,” he says. “But then I saw something else in their eyes, that tiniest bit of hope. And I think it’s because we were there. Because I was there.”

So Mizrahi got up and charged forward. The Purifier saw his approach and fired a burst of flame at Mizrahi, but the X-Man managed to jump to the side. As he rolled through the now-singed grass and underbrush, Mizrahi concentrated. He reached out a hand and hit the Purifier with a heat blast that managed to cut through the armor at key points with controlled slices of light energy.

The Purifier, Mizrahi says, crumpled backward from the heat blast, disoriented and badly weakened. Beast and Nightcrawler moved in, attacking at the Purifier’s now compromised armor. His suit failing, the terrorist quickly surrendered. 

There are many stories of those victories, Mizrahi says. But just as many of the physical toll on his body and more importantly, the psychological one on his mind. 

Mizrahi doesn’t want to remember an attempt about six months later to track down and capture the mutant terrorist and serial-killer known as Sabretooth. But not wanting to remember doesn’t make it any less real. 

“The easiest of the fear is just watching 250 pounds of solid, snarling muscle barreling at you,” he says.

The worst are the memories of Sabretooth’s victims, innocent men and women the sadist tore through with his bare hands for no reason other than sport. The X-Men managed to stop him eventually but they had to track and find him first after Sabretooth’s mental prowess kept the team from tracking him closer than somewhere within the city of Minsk, Russia. 

Minsk police believe Sabretooth killed at least five people and there are reports of more. Mizrahi says he saw at least one victim and remembers the steam and smell of blood rising up to meet him. They’d missed Sabretooth by as little as five minutes. 

Eventually, the enigmatic tracker and X-Man Logan, known to the world as Wolverine, managed to join Mizrahi’s team and they were able to put an end to the carnage. But even as he shivers at the cold of Minsk, Mizrahi still remembers the warmth of blood. 

And now?

“I’m still fighting. But now the demons are in my head,” he whispers. 

At the age of 18, Mizrahi was diagnosed with severe PTSD.

“A car backfires and I jump. A plane flies overhead and I jump. A train rolls by…” and Mizrahi’s voice trails off.

Mizrahi insists that the X-Men tried to help him when the panic attacks became so bad he could hardly leave the bathroom, let alone join the team on missions. But the X-Men don’t have therapists and for all their combat training and weaponry, critics say they’ve done nothing to actually account for the mental costs. There’s no rehabilitation program. No structured transition back to a life that isn’t filled with violence. 

Xavier himself sat down with Mizrahi but all the young man could really feel, Mizrahi says, was a stranger poking around in his mind, further violating the sanctity of a space that already felt strange and alien to him. 

“So I started drinking. It smooths out the edges for a bit,” he says.

At first Mizrahi thought it was normal to need a beer after a firefight. Seventeen year-olds do drink after all, he rationalized. 

The X-Men, Mizrahi says, didn’t know he’d sneak off to use a fake ID in town. At least not at first. But the trips became more frequent, his grades slipped, and one day he realized he couldn’t really remember the last time he’d been sober. But it kept the demons to the back of his mind where no comforting words could.

On his first mission, Mizrahi was just 15 years old. He says he begged to be let into the X-Men. He knew he had something to contribute and was sick of letting everyone else get the glory. And sometimes the glory still feels right to him, he says. 

“But sometimes I just wish I didn’t need to drink away the noises in my head,” he says. “I’m in therapy, and I’m trying to sober up, and I’m trying to forget the worst of the place. I’m trying to forget the bodies I saw that we couldn’t save. And how much fireworks sound like incoming mortars.”

Mizrahi insists he doesn’t regret his time with the X-Men. But still he wonders what life would have been like without them.

“I have a fraternal twin brother,” he says. “He doesn’t have powers. And the night he went to prom at his normal high school, I was dodging gunfire.” 

Mizrahi pauses, and repeats the word “normal” a few times, seemingly trying to sound out the word. “I wish I remembered what that really felt like in my head.”


End file.
